Friday, January 22, 2016

2015: The Year SOUTH PARK Finally Got Old

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Let me first stipulate the following to be true, as I see it:

South Park is one of the funniest television shows ever created and arguably among the most culturally-significant.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are two of the most gifted comedy writers, in any medium, of their generation.

Both the series and its creators would deservedly retain their pop-immortality even if neither entity were to produce a single work of further note (however unlikely that appears to be.)

Anyone over the age of 30 writing on the subject of popular-culture in 2015 who declares something else to be “old” is all but certainly asking for at least 1/3rd of whatever they get.

That having been said…

If
Trey Parker, Matt Stone and South Park
have always better than almost anyone in the business at exactly one thing,
it’s preventative self-defense: Few other creators are as consistently reflective
enough to anticipate almost any criticism of their work and bake sly
inoculative retorts directly into the batter. This is, after all, the same
series and creative team that structured their (thus far) sole theatrical
outing, South Park: Bigger, Longer &
Uncut, around the conceit of a busybody helicopter mom unwittingly
unleashing an Apocalyptic war with Canada over fury at her son being admitted
to an R-rated animated film.

So
it was both unsurprising but also a bit worrying when the series’ fifteenth
season’s penultimate episode arrived with the title “You’re Getting Old,”
telling a story that felt as nakedly autobiographical as any before (which is
saying something!) in which Stan Marsh (Parker) finds himself in a state of
agonizing depression after being struck with an age-related malady leaving him
unable to enjoy any of the hobbies, music, movies or even
personal-relationships that once brought him joy. Despite poor Stan’s illness
being framed in terms of perceiving a world literally morphing into feces (this
is still South Park, after all) it
was as sad a half hour of TV as ever produced; and that was before Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide” queued
up over a pointedly punchline-free finale. To twist the knife further, the
storyline’s subsequent concluding episode (“Ass Burgers”) teased the
possibility of positive personal-growth from the experience… only to rip it
away with a comedically-slapdash hard-reset to zero and a stinging final jab,
implying that Stan’s continued “in character” participation in classic-style Park shenanigans with his friends from
there on out was to be possible only through drinking himself into a stupor
first.

Dark,
sure, but also slyly utilitarian: Let no one dare say that any subsequent
season carry a sense of creative fatigue or the appearance of going through the
motions, lest Parker and Stone (or their legions of fans/defenders) banish you
to their Island of Human Punchlines with Barbara Streisand and the Church of
Scientology; no doubt cackling all the way. “Ha
ha! No duh, genius! We told you that way back in Season 15!”

So
it was with an ever-optimistic sense of “maybe they’re building to something I
just don’t see yet” that I watched as the show’s most recent season (its
nineteenth, i.e. four years out from “You’re Getting Old,” for those keeping
track) play out with something feeling consistently… “off.” To be sure, the
laughs were still to be had and the craftsmanship was as impeccable (and
consistently-evolving) as ever. But there was a sense permeating the air that
something in the chemistry – or perhaps the ingredients? – had changed; and as
the season-long storyline charged toward its climax (South Park is the latest series to embrace the binge-friendly
format of longform episode-to-episode continuity) and a consistent tone, theme
and choice of targets began to coalesce in hindsight I could finally give it a
name:

Old.
The characters, the creators (speaking through them,) the philosophy, the voice of the show suddenly sounds so
very, very old.

South Park
hit the popular culture in 1997 with the kind of out-of-nowhere impact that
nothing can really have anymore, at the last moment in history when “everyone”
(at least as defined in terms of Western TV viewership) would find out about a
new piece of media all at once. Whereas today even the most obscure talent can
accrue a legion of followers via the internet before finally spilling into the
world’s livingroom, what became South
Park was only ever a crudely-animated video Christmas card from a pair of
malcontent Midwestern comedians being passed around Hollywood by this or that
insider (early fans included George Clooney) until Comedy Central – seeking to
radically rebrand itself away from a clearing-house for standup-boom overflow
and quirky fare like the (then) recently-departed Mystery Science Theater 3000 – took a huge chance on a series
order. And while history will undoubtedly remember Jon Stewart’s retooled Daily Show (arriving two years later in
’99) as the network’s most lasting and important contribution to the culture,
for a minute there Parker and Stone’s foul-mouthed quartet were the face of new
wave in TV comedy.

The
show seemed to stumble into greater relevance somewhat by accident. It wasn’t
the first animated series to work “blue” or to come under fire for it (even The Simpsons, which feels about as
“edgy” as Spongebob at this point,
earned protests back in the day) but it felt like the first one to truly
lean-into the criticism and thrive as a result. Parker and Stone may have begun
with a punk rock mandate to enrage as many as possible, up to an including
their own fans (early-adopters scratched their heads at an episode that dropped
the scatology for an extended Godzilla/Ultraman pastiche and shocked the
creators themselves by not finding
it hilarious to have been denied an answer to the question of Eric Cartman’s
parentage) but when push came to shove it turned out the duo had a lot to say
about politics, media and the culture.

Deviously,
since they often said so in the voices of precocious cartoon children, their
words were invested with a cutting sense of immediacy: No matter what Parker
and Stone had to say, it sounded fresh, new and doubly-transgressive so long as
it was coming out of Stan, Kyle, Cartman or Kenny – a nifty trick of the medium
not deployed so effectively since Charlie Brown singlehandedly collapsed the
aluminum Christmas tree industry, and one that South Park used so cannily for so long that having done so is yet
another mark in the series’ favor and further testament to its creators’ skill.
It also helped that their other skills included maintaining a Herculean
turnaround-time in production and a willingness to remain truly engaged with
the culture they were commenting on; debuting episodes about “World of
Warcraft,” Game of Thrones, Pokemon
and even the election of Barack Obama at their discussion-worthy high points.

But
all things eventually recede, and in retrospect it seems almost appropriate
that I’d get the sense that mortality had finally come to South Park at the tail end of the same year that also saw Comedy
Central’s (by now) more iconic fixtures, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, bring
down the curtain on tenures that defined an entire generation of American
political comedy if not politics, period. The difference, though, was that
Stewart’s Daily Show and The Colbert Report came to an end by
their creators own hands – and in acknowledgment that they’d said their piece
and it was time to move on. By contrast, what was ultimately so disquieting
about this season of South Park was
how uncharacteristically non-introspective it seemed to be. Not only did Parker
and Stone’s avatars, so much more than ever before, sound like angry old(er)
men shouting back at a world passing by; they seemed for the first time ever to
be striding ahead completely unaware
of it.

For
those who didn’t watch (or only peeked,) the season’s episodes were structured
around an elaborate conspiracy storyline wherein newly-sentient internet
advertisements attempted a They Live-style
covert takeover of society, starting in South Park, Colorado. The tendrils of
the conspiracy manifested in a variety of seemingly-unrelated ways, from
construction of a Whole Foods to the gentrification of the town to the
popularity of a subgenre of Japanese fan-art depicting same-sex relationships
among male cartoon characters (because this is, again, still South Park;) but by far the most
prominent was the arrival of a new major antagonist in the form of “PC
Principal,” a school administrator who approached a zealous commitment to a
laundry list of social-justice causes with an incongruous bullying macho
bravado befitting his stereotypical frat-rat character design. In what will
probably go down as the season’s signature episode, PC Principal’s attempt to
establish criticism-free “safe spaces” for everyone in town gave rise to a
personification of “Reality” in the form of a sneering silent movie villain,
who berated the townspeople (but, really, the audience) not confronting the
supposed facts of daily life – or, in his words, “Well, I’m sorry the world
isn’t one big liberal arts campus!”

PC
Principal, of course, made an apparent face-turn to the side of good in the
season’s strange, rushed-feeling finale. And some of the season’s other
attention-grabbing topical bugbears (police shootings, Donald Trump, Caitlyn Jenner)
likely would’ve been targets for South
Park even without some sort of unifying season-long theme, with Parker and
Stone having always taken particular glee in tweaking the nose of topical
progressive causes, particularly those embraced by their reflexively-liberal
Hollywood peers. But the inclusion of yaoi (male/male romance) fan-art as the
main plot-point of an entire episode (“Tweak x Craig”) helped to crystallize,
for me, a theme within the theme: namely that this wasn’t simply South Park returning to Team America: World Police’s well of
sneering-back at the smug side of pop-progressivism, but more pointedly two of
the leading voices of Generation X comedy taking in the increasing cultural-prominence
of Millennials and finally, in exasperation and with an almost suspicious lack
of self-awareness, demanding to know, well… “What’s the matter with kids
today!?”

Yaoi,
of course, is an established art and literary subgenre with a long and complex
history in its native Japan, but it’s popularity has come to the West mainly in
the form of online fan-art and exploded in recent years on the social-media
platform Tumblr, a fact which feels like the key to the whole season if you’re
as familiar with internet-activism culture as Parker and Stone clearly are (the
platform has played a part in prior episodes of the series.) Moreso than
Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr’s reputation has become that of a rallying-point
for socially-conscious Millennials, particularly around social-justice subjects
like race and gender politics (fairly or not, it’s often framed as the
left-of-center opposite to older libertarian/right-leaning platforms like
Reddit and 4chan) which Tumblr users often promote via a mutually-supportive
meme-sharing culture that thrives particularly at the intersection of politics
and pop-culture where South Park once
reigned supreme: In 2005, it was amazing that Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny
could turn every snarky college kid into an anti-Scientology whistleblower in a
single broadcast, but fifteen years later it’s Tumblr that can mass-anoint the
latest Disney Princess an LGBT icon halfway through the first trailer – with both
phenomena sharing only the occasionally-overzealous righteousness of their
advocates.

In
online-adjacent spaces, Tumblr often stands in as a rhetorical punching-bag for
everyone from outright hate-groups (think the “GamerGate” harassment campaign,
or the various arms of Breitbart and Stormfront) to more reasoned blowback from
aging Boomer and Gen-X comedians like Jerry Seinfeld (or Chris Rock) bracing at
criticism about offensive jokes from “politically correct” Millennial
audiences. PC Principal, of course, is a blunt personification of the former, a
literal “PC bully” inflicting aggressive punishment on anyone who dares speak
or think out of step with an ever-changing ideological purity; what innumerable
hand-wringing thinkpieces have dubbed the “outrage culture.”

All
of this, especially the spinning of inbound-criticism into a caricatured
villain, is the stuff classic South Park
has previously been made of, but this time there’s a palpable lack of actual
connective tissue between the disparate elements (a late-arriving moral about
politically-correct speech being “gentrification, but for language” lands with
a bizarre, impotent thud in the finale) which is, quite frankly, shocking
coming from creators who once turned their rivalry with Family Guy into an occasion to examine freedom of expression
vis-a-vi religious parody in the post-9/11 era. Parker and Stone are hardly
bulletproof and Park has stumbled
plenty before, but the spectacle of a series that rewrote the book on staying
evergreen and engaged with the culture it satirized seemingly devoting an
entire season to scoffing at the concerns of the rising generation without any
accompanying self-appraisal was utterly puzzling – particularly since the self-defense was still there, with PC
Principal’s first scene being a monologue about how the town’s (read: the series’)
behavior was “stuck in a time warp.”

That’s
not to say that South Park (or any
other series) has some kind of obligation to keep current with the generational
or political winds. Indeed, the show (and its creators’) eagerness to prod the
left and right with equal vigor has always been part of its signature. It’s
easy to forget, but when the series landed right in the midst of the Clinton
90s (the decade where “political correctness” first became a mainstream phrase)
seeing a comedy show with actual youth-culture street cred fire volleys at environmentalism,
the “tolerance” push and other progressive-perennials Gen-Xers had been
receiving as default-positives from Sesame
Street right up through Friends
was part of what made it feel exciting and different. It’s also what won the
series a (then) unlikely following on the right-wing, with columnist Andrew
Sullivan dubbing circa-2001 young conservatives “South Park Republicans” to the
chagrin of the creators; who steadfastly insisted that they (and the show) had
staked their claim squarely in the middle: on the South Park moral spectrum, the military/industrial right and the
do-gooder left are equal antagonists of the “little guy” who was likely doing
just fine until they started bothering him.

Of
all the personal fixations and grievances that Parker and Stone contributed to South Park’s foundational DNA, that
particular outlook is perhaps the most quintessentially demonstrative of their
upbringing in the American Midwest, a region given to seeing itself as caught
between the battles of clashing cultural-behemoths; be it the Republican South
versus Democrat coasts or merely New York verus Los Angeles as economic
power-centers. But it’s also a universally-comforting notion, since almost
everyone would like to think of themselves as the normal, sensible person beset
on all fronts by absurd extremes – and who, after all, doesn’t prefer stability
(their own, at least) to chaos and upheaval? When a protest-march shuts down a
city block, South Park’s first
instinct is to look past the activists and
their enemy to cast sympathy with the folks who didn’t ask to be involved but
are now late for work all the same.

But
the absolute middle is as much a fantasy as the existence of “pure” good or
evil, and the problem with “leave me alone” as a philosophical ideal (whether
for a cartoon show or a human life) is that you can’t resist upheaval without
also upholding the status-quo. And in an era where “change” itself (changes in
demographics, changes in society, changes in acceptable language, etc) is often
at the forefront of our most divisive discussions, being reflexively
anti-upheaval (regardless of the reason) is very much taking a side no matter how
much one insists otherwise. This is tricky terrain for any work of satire where
immediacy is part of the brand: It gets increasingly hard to be a rock star
when you’re the one asking for the music to be turned down.

That’s
precisely the predicament where Parker, Stone and South Park have now found themselves, in my estimation: It took a
while, but they seem to have crossed the point where their dual
central-sympathies – their own self-righteousness and the righteousness of
put-upon “little guys” – are no longer one and the same. South Parkis The
Establishment at this point, and the little guys in perpetual danger of being
trampled increasingly look less like the middle-age Generation-Xers who created
it and more like the aggrieved rainbow of dissidents making noise on the likes
of Tumblr (or out in the streets, for that matter.) And Season 19, by the end,
felt like nothing so much as the creators gnashing their teeth at ascendant
Millennials moments after the realization of this finally smacked them in the
face. “Hmph! You kids today with your hula-hoops and your social justice!”

On
the one hand, there’s no rule that says edgy humor is the sole province of the
under-30 set: witness the aforementioned Jon Stewart’s career-defining
metamorphosis from snarky MTV fixture to the sarcastic gray-haired political
conscience of a nation for proof of that. But while it’s entirely possible for
comedy (and comedians) to survive or even thrive as in the form of an
ever-aging grownup grousing about “kids today,” it’s unclear exactly how South Park would do so. Unlike The Simpsons, which gradually pivoted
focus from Bart to Homer in transition from trendy-troublemaker to
cultural-landmark stature, Park feels
permanently wed to the Main Four as central figures. Family Guy navigated similar longevity-pains (your mileage may vary
on their success at such) by allowing creator Seth McFarlane’s self-insert
character, Brian, to shift organically from being the moral-center of the
series to a narcissistic, out-of-touch grump that nobody likes; but “You’re
Getting Old” already took Park’s
version of that kind of character-shift to the logical extreme and back again.

On
the other hand, not every act stays potent in advancing age. Once upon a time,
Dennis Miller was political comedy’s pre-Jon Stewart icon; a human-thesaurus
motormouth whose snarky takes on current-events made his HBO series a kind of
proto-Daily Show. But the march of
time (and a self-admitted life-altering reaction to 9/11) took his comedy in an
angrier, more conservative direction; and to the degree that he’s known at all
today it’s for a right-wing talk radio show (recently concluded) and a
recurring guest spot on The O’Reilly
Factor – a fate far-removed from what the fans who once regarded him as the
“thinking man’s” stand-up hero. Granted, it’s unlikely anything so extreme
awaits the maestros of South Park
(for one thing, they’ve already established a second mega-successful career as
blockbuster Broadway musical creators,) but the gap between Miller’s
full-throated embrace of Bush-era neoconservativism to the bafflement of his
Gen-X fanbase and Parker and Stone’s grumpy cynicism about “Tumblr
Generation”-embraced causes like transgender issues feels less and less vast
every day; and the spectre of Miller’s fall hangs over every comic who wakes up
one day to find themselves as the Old Man when just yesterday they were still
the children he’s about to order off the lawn.

The
final irony, though, and the one which makes South Park’s Season 19 pivot feel all the more askew, is the
particularities of just what about
Millennial social-consciousness, Tumblr-activism, “outrage culture” and the
rest seems to bother Parker and Stone so much. The grievances bubbling under
the season’s narrative-surface are familiar to anyone whose endured a wave or
three of Internet blowback against “SJWs” (“Social Justice Warriors”): They’re
too angry. They’re never satisfied. They “shoot” first and ask questions later.
They demand ideological purity. They don’t respect procedure, or tenure, or
institutions. They rant and rave and rage, treat pop-culture alternately like a
toybox or target-range and won’t take “that’s not how it’s done” for an answer.
They, effectively, act like indignant, infuriated adolescents too charged up at
discovering a new power to shape the cultural conversation to bother wielding
it any measure of responsibility.

That
reminds me of somebody I used to know. Somebody who reacted to worries about
how to tell jokes post-9/11 with “Watch us.” Somebody who wasn’t simply
unafraid but eager to “call out”
everyone from Michael Moore to Christopher Reeve to Tom Cruise. Somebody who’s
response to professional-betrayal by a colleague was an eye-poppingly combative
“Fine, go – but we’re gonna turn your character into a brainwashed
child-molester and then kill him.” Somebody who saw the value in being loud,
angry and tactless where it concerned getting one’s point across, and who
didn’t merely invite the condescension and hand-wringing of the older
generation but actually reveled in
it. Sound like anyone you used to know, Stan? Or you, Kyle?

There’s
no such thing, as Trey Parker and Matt Stone have always been all too eager to
remind us, as an unacceptable target when it comes to satire. But choice and
timing of targets can reveal a lot about those picking them, and in turning the
full measure of its guns (an entire
season of television) on perceived cornerstones of Millennial culture and,
implicitly, on Millennials as a generational-class themselves, South Park would appear to have
completed its transition from rebellious “angry kid” firebrand raging at every
hint of authority to established, dug-in angry old man shaking a fist at the
generation rising up behind it. And while South
Park has endured and made fools of its critics before, it’s hard to imagine
how you pull out of this particular trajectory when your “brand” has always
been blunt-honesty at all costs.

“You’re Getting Old,”
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About Me

Bob is a part-time independent filmmaker, part-time amateur film critic and full time Movie Geek. He is heterosexual, a pisces, and a severely lapsed Catholic. He is a tireless enemy of censorship, considers his personal politics "Libertine" and enjoys acting as a full time irritant to overly serious people of ALL political stripes.